Does the registration of pharmacists mean simply a guarantee of competency to fill prescriptions?
Should drugs of a questionable degree of potency be given indiscriminately to the public, without someone who understands them to either recommend or advise against their use?
Is not the competition waged in the traffic of medicines to an irresponsible public by houses without registered proprietors in fact considered in an entirely different line of business, as much a hardship to the big druggist as to the little man, simply a question of proportion, and if continued must mean but one thing, “the survival of the fittest?”
Suppose we turn from drugs and chemicals to other forms of medication. What protection have any of you? Only very recently one of the large general merchants advertised vaccine virus, and actually vaccinated his customers.
But the druggist lies supinely by, with scarcely a murmur of protest, while National, State and Municipal laws are made for him. Laws that are definite, made to prosecute, to handle him criminally and contemptuously; that afford no protection, allow not the slightest leeway, are as fragile as glass apparently for others, but for him as unyielding and inflexible as steel, and as positive as the Decalogue; made by men who have no practical knowledge of the business, know little, and inform themselves less on the matter they are legislating. Why does the druggist submit? Has he become callous through long exposure to this condition? Does he hope to win his immortal crown through his great humility and patience, or does he accept as a fact that he is following a well-defined precedent, for as far back as Shakespeare’s time we find Romeo saying to the apothecary:
“Upon thy back hangs ragged misery.
The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law.
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this, etc.”